Personal Effects

Nancy Caronia (Edited By)
Nancy Caronia is a lecturer at University of Rhode Island. She teaches in the Honors Program, Gender & Women’s Studies, and in the departments of English and Writing and Rhetoric. She works on issues of transnationalism and globalization in contemporary American and Anglophone ethnic literature and film. Her scholarly essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture, New Delta Review, and Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her introduction to Casting Off will appear in Bordighera’s reprint of DeSalvo’s novel.
Edvige Giunta (Edited By)
Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University, where she teaches memoir and other literature and writing courses. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and Dire l’indicibile. She is co- editor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (with Louise DeSalvo); Italian American Writers on New Jersey (with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan); Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick); and Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (with Joseph Sciorra).

Edvige Giunta (Editor)
Edvige Giunta is a professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and co-editor of five anthologies, including The Milk of Almonds and Embroidered Stories. Born in Sicily, she first became interested in the Triangle fire as a young activist. She has trained scores of students in the art of memoir and created the first course devoted to the Triangle fire.
Mary Anne Trasciatti (Editor)
Mary Anne Trasciatti is President of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. The daughter and granddaughter of garment workers, she has devoted the past twelve years of her life to ensuring the creation of a Triangle Fire Memorial. She is a professor of Rhetoric and Director of Labor Studies program at Hofstra University in Long Island. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Where are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites.

Emily Bernard is a professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of
Vermont. Her publications include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes
and Carl Van Vechten (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Some of My
Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004), which was chosen as a New York Public
Library Book for the Teen Age, 2006. Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009),
a book she coauthored with Deborah Willis, received an NAACP Image Award in spring 2010.
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White was published by Yale University Press in 2012.

Mary Jo Bona, Professor of Italian American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (2010) and Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1999). She is editor of The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction (1994), co-editor of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (2006), and series editor of Multiethnic Literature for SUNY Press.

Jenn Brandt is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at High Point University, where
she is also an assistant professor of English. Brandt’s work focuses on gender and cultural
studies in literature, popular film, and television. She is particularly interested in the ways
in which politics shape and reflect contemporary literature and culture.

Amy Jo Burns writes about the cross-sections between literature and television for Ploughshares. Her literary memoir Cinderland appeared in 2014.

Kimberly A. Costino is Professor of English and Director of the Teaching Resource Center at California State University, San Bernardino. Her research interests include Italian American women’s autobiography, literacy, composition, and critical race studies, particularly the politics of language, the relationship between language and identity, and issues of access to higher education. Her articles have been published in The Journal of Second Language Writing and The WPA Journal and she has published book chapters on teaching Italian American literature and on Gloria Naylor's novels.

Peter Covino is a poet, translator, editor, and associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. His most recent book of poetry is The Right Place to Jump (2012). In 2007, he received the PEN America/Osterweil Award for emerging poets. He is also the author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005) and the chapbook Straight Boyfriend (2001), winner of the Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize. With Dennis Barone, he co-edited the volume, Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture (2011).

Jeana DelRosso is professor of English and women’s studies and director of the honors program at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore. She is the author of Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives (2005). She is the co- editor of The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays (2007) and Unruly Catholic Women Writers: Creative Responses to Catholicism (2013). Her articles have appeared in NWSA Journal and MELUS.

Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger studies and teaches Italian American literature,
nineteenth- and twentieth- century American literature, and international modernism. Her
recent work examines representations of food in Italian American literature. She is currently
co- editing Advocacy and Activism: Italian Heritage and Cultural Change, a volume of collected papers for IASA (Italian American Studies Association).

Joshua Fausty is associate professor of English at New Jersey City University, where he teaches
courses on literature, film, composition, the essay, and creative nonfiction. His articles, interviews, reviews, and creative nonfiction appear in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; TutteStorie; Afterall; VIA: Voices in Italian Americana; The Paterson Literary Review; and Screening Ethnicity.

Margaux Fragoso holds a PhD from Binghamton University. Her poems, fiction, and essays, and reviews have been published in Margie, Barrow Street, The Literary Review, Big City Lit, The George Eliot Review, NPR, and The New York Times. Her memoir Tiger, Tiger has been named a best book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post, and Globe and Mail and has been published in twenty-five countries and translated into twenty languages.

John Gennari is associate professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University
of Vermont. He is the author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006), winner of the
2007 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Book in American Cultural Studies, and of a 2007
ASCAP– Deems Taylor Award for excellence in popular music criticism.

Benjamin D. Hagen received his PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island in 2012
and now serves as the English program coordinator at its College of Continuing Education. He teaches courses in modern literature and critical theory. His research on Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens has been published in journals such as Modernism / Modernity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Mark Hussey has been active in Woolf scholarship for nearly thirty years. In addition to his own many edited and authored articles and books on Woolf, he is general editor of the Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, a member of the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, a founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a co-editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

Lia Ottaviano graduated from Hunter College’s Creative Nonfiction MFA program in 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York by way of Coventry, Rhode Island, and is a Senior Editorial Assistant at John Wiley & Sons Publishing.

Theodora Patrona is affiliated with the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece, as Special Teaching Fellow (EDIP). She is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature.

Kym Ragusa is the author of The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging
(2006). A finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 2007 Legacy Award in Nonfiction, it won the Premio John Fante, a literary prize for writers of the Italian diaspora. Her essays have
appeared in several anthologies, as well as in the journals Leggendaria and TutteStorie. Her films Passing and fuori/outside have been shown on PBS and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. She teaches writing at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at MIT.

Ilaria Serra is associate professor of Italian and comparative studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research spans from Italian cinema and literature to the history of Italian immigration to the United States. She is the author of Immagini di un immaginario: L’emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti fra i due secoli: 1890– 1925 (1997); The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies (2007); and The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (2009).